The Mountains of Madness

I have been reading the Lovecraft stories for the Book Meeting and got all inspired by "The Mountains of Madness". In general I feel like the stories would be vastly improved by good illustrations. However instead, you have...An "Old One" and a shoggoth.

Both of which are of course linked to in my ever expanding page of things I work on when I should be doing my Phd.

The stories are..interesting. Not the best written literature ever but you can certainly see the influence he has had on later writers/film-makers etc. It's interesting to compare to the Dorothy L. Sayers murder mysteries I'm also reading, since they're written at around the same time but have very different points of view. Anyway, I should keep all my comments bottled up to dazzle everyone at the book meeting!

My life is suddenly exciting again

But in a good way this time! Basically I decided there's enough semi-interesting stuff going on that people might want to know about that I should do an update.

So...my life for September:

• 1st-15th: Give 6 lectures for 3CC. My first time lecturing!!
• 10th: Give practice talk at Groups and Combinatorics Seminar. (Its a maths dept thing)
• 15th: Give lecture in AA213
• 18th: Bookclub at Tiamos.
• 19th: Mums birthday party, I'm supposed to organise the food.
• 25th: Romeo and Juliet ballet with grandma
• 26th: Leave for Victorian Algebra and AMS conferences at RMIT. I'm giving a 25 minute talk!

I arrive back in Perth on the 3rd of October after 2 days of holiday. Anyone with suggestions for stuff to do in Melbourne is welcome to tell me!

And of course theres my thesis, too, which is due in February. Csaba is pushing to finish this paper he I and Cheryl have been working on for ages, which is annoying since I'm currently doing something completely different with Alice. (They're my three supervisors by the way. Generally I work with one or two while the other(s) are in another country/having a baby/being sub-dean etc but sometimes they all descend on me at once)

Oh, and we're looking after Cam's parents cat for a week while they're in Hong Kong. Don't tell the landlord!

Anyway, if you see me over the next month and a half and I'm a little curt, it's not you. Probably. Unless you're the cat and whining becuase I didn't give you the right combination of the five different kinds of food you've grown accustomed to. Bah.

And no, I'm not going to turn this into a diary style "livejournal". At least I hope not!

Lucky Me

I just had my nice reading-a-"new"-Dorothy L.Sayers-in-front-of-the-heater reverie ruined by a phonecall.
A recorded voice said "Congratulations!" ("Uh-huh" thinks I)
"You have been selected for the chance to win a Porsche Boxer! Ring the following number and answer some Porsche related questions at a rate of only $5.50 a minute! Calls garaunteed not to last more than 5 minutes"

Gee, $25 for the chance to win a car? What a bargain!!

Anyway, back to my book...in case you're wondering, it's "Five Red Herrings". I love Dorothy L Sayers but she really is a product of her times, I'm 3 pages in and we have the line "like all Englishmen, was ready enough to admire and praise all foreigners except the dagoes and niggers, but, like all Englishmen, he did not like to hear them praise themselves"

In Gaudy Night she has a few unsympathetic pro-fascist characters, but you get the feeling it was mainly becuase she thought they took themselves too seriously and lacked taste. These books were written in the 30's, by the way. Great murder mysteries and a snapshot of a very interesting period in time.

*goes off to read*